While experiencing rapid adoption of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) EMR offering—with 270 percent growth in 2011—Practice Fusion needed greater visibility into and control over its application performance. The SaaS provider evaluated several legacy APM tools, but found that, because of its agentless, network-based approach, only the ExtraHop system could provide real-time visibility across the network, web, database, and storage tiers without requiring any configuration. Furthermore, the ExtraHop system could analyze encrypted traffic in real time without risking privacy violations by storing packets.

"Before ExtraHop, we had many point solutions that provided information about discrete components, but nothing that gave us a holistic, correlated view," said John Hluboky, VP of Technical Operations, Practice Fusion. "There's no other APM solution like ExtraHop on the market today in terms of real-time visibility across tiers. With the ExtraHop system, we've achieved the 'holy grail' of IT operations where we're not just remediating problems faster, but preventing problems from occurring in the first place."

Practice Fusion has seen significant returns on its investment in the ExtraHop system:

Proactive IT operations. Through ExtraHop's proactive early-warning capabilities, Practice Fusion has been able to successfully prevent technical problems from impacting users even as the number of users doubled over the past year.

More-efficient IT infrastructure. Practice Fusion has also been able to use the ExtraHop system to increase IT infrastructure efficiency across its 80-percent-virtualized and rapidly growing IT environment—in one case avoiding $75,000 in capital expense on unnecessary new hardware during a virtualization migration.

Support for the entire application lifecycle. Practice Fusion deployed the ExtraHop system in their staging environment so the Engineering team can see the impact of new code against baseline performance. "We can see the performance of particular web servers or URLs when using a certain type of transaction, for example," says Hluboky. "We catch performance issues earlier in the development cycle this way and also monitor the impact of new code releases the next day when users start logging in."

"Patient lives depend on the availability and responsiveness of EMR systems because medical providers use those systems to check patient histories and possible adverse drug interactions," said Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop CEO. "Practice Fusion is pioneering new ways of providing reliable EMR systems to medical providers, and we feel very privileged to play a role in their success."

ExtraHop Networks is the leading provider of network-based application performance management (APM) solutions. The ExtraHop Application Delivery Assurance system performs the fastest and deepest analysis in the industry, achieving real-time transaction monitoring at speeds up to a sustained 10Gbps in a single appliance and application-level visibility with no agents, configuration, or overhead. The ExtraHop system quickly auto-discovers and auto-classifies applications and devices, delivering immediate value out of the box. ExtraHop Networks provides award-winning solutions to companies across a wide range of industries, including ecommerce, communications, and financial services. The privately held company was founded in 2007 by Jesse Rothstein and Raja Mukerji, engineering veterans from F5 Networks and architects of the BIG-IP v9 product. Follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop. For more information, visit www.extrahop.com.

About Practice Fusion

Practice Fusion provides a free, web-based EMR system to physicians. With medical charting, scheduling, e-prescribing (eRx), lab integrations, referral letters, Meaningful Use certification, unlimited support and a Personal Health Record for patients, Practice Fusion's EMR software addresses the complex needs of today's healthcare providers and disrupts the health IT status quo. Practice Fusion is the fastest growing electronic medical record community in the country with more than 150,000 users serving 50 million patients. The company announced a $34 million Series C financing led by Artis Ventures in June. For more information about Practice Fusion, please visit www.practicefusion.com.